A thread was locked in Off Topic on the subject of flags, created by one RichardUK.

Despite what seems like some sort of discrimination against the man as well as the direct insult to the man's personal interests in flags, there were many who were able to contribute and have fun in discussing flags.

What I and many likeminded members (see the HDYFRN thread) ask is that the thread be unlocked and go unharassed by moderators making vague threats and demands to "improve the thread".

This is an unofficial spin-off forum of ONM. It does no harm to anyone to let the guy be happy discussing a personal interest of his and have many other members take a strange amount of joy on discussing it with him.

Last edited by mewthree on Sun Sep 04, 2016 8:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

GreenWaluigi: and i somehow ACCIDENTALLY jerked it right up INTO MY EYEBALL

As much as I agree that this is all a pointless farce anyway, I think we should have some standards at the very least.

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I don't want to be a part of this discussion really, because I think that the Union Flag is a hideous affront to design and taste. Its bold, striped, red, white and blue colouring as obnoxious as the egotistical, national isolationist viewpoint of many who stand behind it. It has been flown to promote human rights atrocities on the greatest scale in the name of the empire and the divine right of the kingdom, and is linked with groups that promote hate and race crimes to this day. It makes me nauseous to see the sycophantism displayed around it at every opportunity. The royal standard is almost as bad, because it symbolises a country's blind allegiance to unelected, unaccountable leaders, the entrenchment of whose privileged place in society no-one calls into question, and is even celebrated.

So, as someone who is not an advocate of the predominant content of that thread, I can't really be seen to take a neutral stance, seeing as I feel the world is better without another source of blatant nationalist propaganda.

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However, if I was approaching it rationally, I would call it a vanity project on a forum that is a communal space, and it serves as no point of discussion, as the main poster repeatedly fails to engage with the discussion points raised by other members, instead repeating his views as though that is what a discussion is. My suggestion is that Richard starts up a blog or a mailing list, and people can subscribe to that as they like, and he is not obliged to respond to comments.

If he sets up a blog, then he's welcome to promote it in GAaW, which promotes personal writing and the like. And everyone can go and read it there.

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This would be my solution, but for the aforementioned reasons, I don't think I'm best placed to deal with this issue. It depends on what the other moderators think. It's already being discussed in the modroom.

Wrathy: Water's not just a drink. I mean, you can't have a bath in lemonade, wash the dishes in sprite or flush the toilet with irn bru.
--Gallery | RedBubble | Never Forget
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I used to have an original sig, now I'm just a mod.

Furthermore, I would like to bring up the locking of my Meme's Thread.

The thread was fine and wasn't an issue, and Richard used it for it's purpose, to post a dank meme. I don't understand why it was locked.

I agree that the flag thread should be unlocked, it wasn't harmful and despite what you all might think it was amusing seeing Richard post news about the Union Jack.

Let's be real here, the forum is in a decline and the most people ever actually post is in controversial threads, and threads that get people talking, namely threads such as The Date Thread, Stuff that Pisses you Off, Robot Feminism, The Monarchy Thread, and the Flag Thread.

With the lockage of the Flag Thread, we lose an active thread on the forum in favour of nothing. Nobody is making groundbreaking threads in Off Topic.

Honestly, if you're going to go as far as locking the Flag Thread for no intelligent reason, then you might as well just delete the entire Off Topic forum.

I suggest a user poll. This way we can gauge what the actual users of SONM would like, which to me is the fairest method it deciding whether or not to unlock the Flag Thread.

Call it a slippery slope fallacy but the overbearing fear of having your content locked because it doesn't meet moderator standards just leads to disenfranchised feelings towards the forum as a whole. When people don't feel free to express themselves then people leave.

This would've been fine on ONM, but SONM has no way of gaining new members, other than the slight chance an old ONM member might want to find what people are up to. Disrespecting (let's be honest, it's not much effort to properly explain why you lock a thread, it's disrespectful not to) your existing members isn't going to keep them around.

As much of a non-issue as the meme thread or the flag thread might seem, they're indicative of the problems the forum has as a whole. At this point when you've gone from having dozens of active members at all times of the day like on the old forums, to maybe 4 or 5 on a good day, it's less about trying to preserve whatever dignity you think the forum has and more about preserving the community that's been cultivated.

Responses like "well go make your own forum" and the like are the sorts of answers expected of late teens on power trips like the mods of old, but when the forum is now populated by people more likely to be in their 20's, who've spent most of their adolescent lives on an internet forum, maybe it's time to just throw them a bone.

The line between judging, say, robot fighting or the like as "good content" compared to a thread about flags being "bad content" is extremely thin. Likewise, the discussion potential of a thread shouldn't be judged solely on the intentions of the original poster. If you want to view a thread as a vanity project for one person to post in, you will see it as that, but if you want to change that you can contribute to it and make it a discussion, rather than just locking it.

GreenWaluigi: and i somehow ACCIDENTALLY jerked it right up INTO MY EYEBALL

The biggest crux behind it is more that Richard has been approached repeatedly by different mods on different occassions to improve the thread's quality and he hasn't. It's great if someone wants an ongoing project with routine updates but we've asked that his updates actually be of some substance rather than just links to news articles. I don't think it's too hard for someone to at least make some effort with a post, especially if you're so "dedicated" to the cause and project but apparently Richard wasn't and it really was, as others pointed out, just a self-containment thread. It doesn't help of course that any conversations started in the thread normally end with Richard falling silent only to be bumped later with updates at which point there's no point to the thread. The bottom line is if you've been asked to do something or x will happen then it's just stupid to be surprised when you carry on and x happens.

As for the state of the forums with this, yeah, we want this to be a place for everyone to enjoy and we want it to survive. We appreciate that yeah, an active part of this place wants it to be a place where they can just post whatever, where they can just eton mess all day and whatever and that's fine. Not sugarcoating it though, we've lost activity from a lot of active members from this place as a result and that's really eton mess and we're trying to get those kinds of people to return. What you guys want just isn't what everyone wants and while yeah, there's a lot of you who are active, we're thinking of the best way to keep this place alive for everyone else too, not just as a place for you guys.

To be fair I've not been on here in months, and even then it's periodic. I only ever come here when I'm linked to something by someone else, and each time I make a brief return the place seems to be dying faster and faster.

I think the biggest positive that could come from all of this is maybe a little more transparency. My absolute biggest pet peeve on the last forum was "the mod room". How countless times people would be judged by what honestly seemed like a clique with a superiority complex at the time. Hell at times I even had mods I'd fallen out with come to me saying "I used to stick up for you in the mod room when you were brought up" which always infuriated me because I'd do nothing to warrant defending and due to the privacy of their actions I'd have no idea what the mods were actually doing. In short, all I'm asking is if the mods really want the support of the members, they just need to communicate it. Instead of locking a thread with a post saying something like "gooseberry fool hell" or the like (see the meme thread which I am not endorsing, just annoyed how nonchalantly it got locked), citing secret mod discussions and private messages with the OP, just explain better why these things happened and maybe delay the locks and allow people to discuss it.

It's not a matter of people "eton mess" because by hook or by crook anyone who wants to do so can and will in any number of threads, but when someone legitimately attempts a little project, even if they come to abandon it in time, it just doesn't seem to justify a lock. If all it became was a thread where he would post news updates now and then with no-one else contributing, then it would become a sad place that even the OP would give up on. At least then that person would realise the hard way how important proper upkeep of a thread is. Trial by popularity, if you will. If people are eton mess and derailing a thread, maybe the problem lies with them and not the thread.

In my short time on here again all I'm seeing is mods not really communicating, users turning outrage into memes because it's all they know how to do in a post-ironic world where nobody wants to be seen taking anything seriously for fear of ridicule, and a total lack of activity as a result.

One last note, are you sure gaining back the members you lost is really worth annoying the members you still have?

GreenWaluigi: and i somehow ACCIDENTALLY jerked it right up INTO MY EYEBALL

- NOM Magazine releases
- NOM Forum is created, promoted in NOM
- Bunch of people join the forum
- NOM shuts down, as does forum
- ONM Magazine opens
- ONM Forum is created, promoted in ONM Magazine
- Bunch of people join the forum, a small proportion being refugees (lol) from old NOM forum
- Lots of spin-off forums like LOL, LLC, CiaL, EoA, ONMix, 4mix dragging members away into different forums (with still a healthy backbone surviving on mainline forum, but smaller)
- ONM Magazine shuts down, as does forum
- SONM opens, only people from previous versions join (as it isn't an official forum), barely any new members join due to lack of promotion anywhere
- Vast majority of people from NOM/ONM/LOL/LLC/CiaL/EoA/ONMix/4mix stop caring, leaving only a handful of people remaining on SONM
- SONM activity dwindles
- ???

Look, losing membership was ALWAYS going to happen. SONM is not NeoGAF, it isn't going to survive no matter what, and there is ZERO promotion of this site ANYWHERE. It doesn't matter how much cleaning up of eton mess you do, nothing is going to help, if you really want to keep an active userbase you're going to just have to Cough Up The Money and pay for promotion elsewhere and make money in through advertising.

Is it ideal? No. But if you really want this forum to not Die Out you have no choice. Don't blame - and alienate - the current users for 'eton mess' (aka HAVING A gooseberry fool PERSONALITY) for not maintaining an active userbase. Sort it out.

Either that, or FINALLY make me an admin so I can sort the eton mess out.

This whole thing is a ridiculous example of how you still operate this place as if it's run by a bunch of magazine staffers. When you think a thread like that is plaguing a board that is predominantly a bunch of 20 somethings posting absolute tripe all the time with people they've known for years, it's evident that you've lost sight of the fact that this forum is only ever going to be these people, and that the community will only ever get smaller until it inevitably fizzles out. It's been long enough for you to realise that nobody else is coming, yet you still moderate this place as if it's full of 13 year olds buying Nintendo magazines.

I know you might still feel like finger puppets with Future staffers poking their fingers up your bum and telling you to keep everyone in line, but there's no need any more. There's nobody you're keeping this clean for; we're all that's left now. At this point the moderation here is just a joke that we talk about outside. We appreciate that it's hosted, but not when I can easily post this video and draw a comparison.

Strange that when you stop someone going into their own playground for them and their friends to have fun in they want to break into someone else's playground and play there. Then oddly enough the people in the other playground get a bit sick of it.

Locking threads people make for a laugh literally achieves nothing. Who in their right mind gives a flying gooseberry fool about their post count? Get real. We all just want to have a bit of fun. When some of our fun constitutes making stupid threads with people we know as characters from films or inanimate objects or even threads about gooseberry fool FISHING it's pretty harmless, but because it doesn't correlate with the mod team's idea of 'fun' then it gets locked and peoples' noses get put out of joint. Locking threads where people are having a laugh is a bad way to get them to keep using your forum or keep enjoying your forum. It's not an exaggeration to say that in the less than a year since I got here it feels that people have got much more overbearing with their idea of "This content is fine" and "This content is not fine". I came for mafia, I stayed for a laugh and now I want to leave because of pricks.

tbh off topic is already a containment forum for eton mess so removing the eton mess from off topic makes off topic completely useless.

like I said if you really want to go around shutting down threads such as memes and flags then you may as well just delete off topic and have this forum slowly die as the only posts are once a day in gnc or pokemon, or an update from fisher on what he's currently playing.

if you want to draw new users in then the best way is to create something that will draw people in. For example, a youtube channel with regular content. the current SONM channel is pretty bare, the issue with this is that you need people constantly creating content, which as we've established the current userbase of this forum has no intention of doing, we're all 20 somethings with jobs and other commitments who don't really care enough to spend our free time creating content for a dying forum. The decline of the Jukebox falls in line with this, simply, nobody can be arsed to fix the problem so it won't get fixed.

as such, it's a fruitless effort trying to bring new members in or bring old members back. You'd be better off spending the time keeping current members here.

Both sides are bringing up good points, and as someone who likes both the fun, jokey and jolly members we used to have as well as the eton mess-centric community we have currently, I'd like to bring in my two cents to the discussion and say what I think of the forum's current situation.

The main reason I feel that the current community has joked and eton mess for as long as they have is down to the lack of fresh members and activity in the community. The main reason places such as reddit's r/jontron became so eton mess-heavy was due to a lack of activity in regards to content, which causes the current members to start joking and eton mess between themselves until they become so bizarre. I feel that SONM is in such a scenario itself.

What we need to do is find a compromise that the community would be fine with, allowing those who wish to post joke threads to continue joking about and those who would prefer proper discussion to continue interacting with the community, because right now, nobody wins with the current set up. The mods clearly want to improve the site for new and/or lost users, which is totally understandable. But the way that users have changed and the community has changed means that the current way it's happening is going to leave a lot of users feeling irritated that the mods are seemingly against the community.

Even something like a subforum in Off Topic (Like the Follow-On Games section in FG&Q) to separate legitimate discussion and jokey/eton mess threads from each other would drastically help the current situation the forum's in. At least, in my opinion.

I might have brought up some awful points, I don't know. The point is, I love(d) both types of SONM and I'd hate to see either one go.